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Movie Marketing Madness: Steve Jobs

steve_jobsWhat kind of people become the subject of movie biopics? Geniuses and villains. We want to see what drives people, whether they’re using their unique talents and gifts but don’t necessarily discriminate between stories where they’re using those gifts for good or for ill. What’s important is that these people are exceptional. We want to understand what makes them tick, either to see the journey of what drove their genius and figure out how to replicated it or gain some clues into what drove their madness and figure out how to prevent it the next time we see it pop up.

Steve Jobs is very much in the “genius” category. Jobs as a cultural figure is wholly unique in how he bridges the tech and lifestyle worlds. Indeed he almost single-handedly brought those two previously disparate world together. There have been other recent filmed versions of Jobs’ life both in feature and documentary form, but this one has a uniquely artistic pedigree. Michael Fassbender plays the title role while Danny Boyle directs from an Aaron Sorkin script. The story doesn’t try to take the same “whole life” route as 2013’s Ashton Kutcher-starring movie but instead focuses on three important product launches by Jobs and Apple and fills in details about his life around those three milestones.

The Posters

There’s plenty of white space on the first – and only – poster. The lead cast list appears at the top, just above the title treatment that includes a cursor element that we’ll see again in the trailers. Below that are the credits for Boyle and Sorkin and then down in the lower right hand corner is a pensive Fassbender as Jobs. The black-and-white image of him holding his chin in thought is clearly meant to evoke some of the most iconic images of Jobs himself without trying to be exact recreations, which is a nice touch.

The Trailers

The first trailer features voiceover of Rogen as Wozniak asking Jobs what it is he does, to which Jobs has a predictably ego-driven reply. We then speed through key scenes from the movie that show the various keynote presentations that make up the story’s pillars along with other key moments like a confrontation over his daughter, Jobs being ousted from the company and more. The three eras being depicted are highlighted by the changing outfits worn by Fassbender as Jobs, a subtle nod to that three-part approach the movie reportedly takes.

It’s pretty effective. Again, there are enough nodes to the three sections of the movie to tip a hand to that structure without scaring the general audience that there’s some sort of highfalutin fancy storytelling technique being utilized. That might scare him off. And we get to see not only most of the supporting cast but also a good look at Fassbender as Jobs in what looks to be a great performance.

The second trailer hits the movie’s structure a bit more clearly, with multiple triptychs of the three versions of Steve Jobs in the spotlight here.

While this one hits many of the same story points it does so in slightly fancier fashion. There’s a repeated motif involving images boiling down to a cursor, an homage to the personal computer Jobs reinvented, even while the overall flow of this trailer is much closer to what I would refer to as traditional.

Online and Social

In a nice touch, the official website opens with an old-school load status bar before that gives way to a recreation of the poster key art. At the bottom of that is a prompt to “Watch the Trailer.”

Moving over to the navigation menu on the left, the first option is “Story,” which has a decent three-paragraph synopsis of the film’s story.

The “Cast & Crew” section is pretty cool. The film’s main actors are presented in a sideways slider with motion images of each one in very classy – and very Apple-like – black-and-white photos. Clicking on those pictures will take you to another motion photo that’s accompanied by a write up of that actor’s previous credits and accomplishments.

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“Videos” has the two trailers as well as the First Look video that kicked off the campaign a while ago.

After that there are three sections that are meant to take you into the three time periods represented in the movie. So there’s 1984, 1988 and 1998 to choose from. If you start out at “1984” you’ll see it’s basically just more motion and still images from that part of the story, sometimes with a quote from the script on top of it. I was hoping for more background into what those years represented for Jobs and why they were chosen as a key focal point, but even so they look pretty cool so I’ll forgive at least some of the thin nature of the content.

The movie’s Facebook page as the usual assortment of video clips, easily-shareable images, countdowns to the film’s release, encouragement to buy tickets now and so on. Same goes for Twitter, while Instagram is pretty sparse, with just a few updates that are mostly promotional images and short videos.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

There has been lots of online and print advertising that I’ve seen, most of which uses some variation on the poster key art of Fassbender looking pensively at the floor while stroking his chin. I’m sure there were outdoor ads using the same artwork as well.

There were also lots of TV spots run, most of them focusing on the plot about Jobs denying he’s related to the girl everyone insists is his daughter. Some were more about the corporate drama, but the daughter plot seemed to be a favorite, maybe as a way to make the movie seem like more of a soap opera-esque story than just a dry “walk and talk” type of film like you might expect from Sorkin in particular.

Media and Publicity

The movie had a pretty successful coming-out at Telluride, where director Boyle got a career tribute (THR, 9/6/15) and where he talked about how taking this job was a bit unusual for him in light of what he’s done before. That screening did generate some awards buzz, but the story points out that the familiarity of the topic – there have been like four movies about Jobs in the last few years, either features or documentaries – may actually work against it since outside of the artistry it’s not like new ground is being broken here. Telluride also provided an opportunity for Rogen to talk about playing a real person (Variety, 9/7/15), which is something that’s pretty unusual for him.

Unfortunately there was a period of time where most of the press for the movie was about a little spat that erupted between Tim Cook and Sorkin. Cook took to the press to call the movie “opportunistic,” like the filmmakers were making a money grab by exploiting Jobs’ story. Sorkin fired back, because that’s what Sorkin does, but eventually apologized for those remarks.

Outside of that, Sorkin would continue to be a focus of the media push in interviews like this (Wired, 9/30/15) where he talked about how he approached writing about the iconic leader of Apple and the responsibility that task brought with it.

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Fassbender would make headlines when, at a Q&A, he joked that he had studied Ashton Kutcher’s performance in the previous movie Jobs from a couple years ago. That’s a fair amount of shade being thrown, which is unusual and all the more noteworthy for it.

About a week before release a study was released showing that buzz for this movie was higher than other recent biopics, likely because of both the familiarity of the subject matter and the fact that this wasn’t being sold like a traditional biopic.

There were lots of stories – this one is a good, large-scale example – about the various efforts to kill the project before it started. Tim Cook and Jobs’ widow reportedly reached out to studios, actors and filmmakers lobbying them to not make it. The movie was also a central part of the Sony email hack last year, something that caused strife both within and without the studio specifically related to the movie. There were also issues with what was and wasn’t accurate in the movie, with Cook and Steve Wozniak taking pains to either distance themselves from the film or make clear what’s fictionalized.

Overall

There’s an emphasis in the campaign on the drama, particularly on Jobs’ denial of having a daughter. The marketing team is obviously hoping this connects with the kind of crowd that makes TV shows like “Scandal” and others a hit since it sets up the “is he or isn’t he” question in a way much like, as I mentioned above, a soap opera type show. The feeling seems to be that this plot point will be an entry point for the general audience who may not be interested in the story of a mogul with limited social skills and a penchant for pissing off his employees and friends.

On the other hand, the campaign obviously wants to appeal to hardcore Apple and tech geeks who will leap at the chance to check out anything related to their beloved guru, even if the veracity of the story is somewhat suspect. The entire look and feel of the campaign, if not the material itself, is designed to evoke Jobs’ famous design aesthetic and works well on that front, even if it at times it kind of feels just inches away from being a parody of itself. That’s because that look and feel *has* been the subject of parody so often over the years. But it achieves what it’s trying to do, which is create a sense of familiarity with the audience and it all comes together into a decent campaign.

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